5 metrics that matter for your Service Department

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Sarah Bilton

What key metrics do you keep track of? When almost any interaction with your Service Department can be monitored, it's important to be able to pull out the right data for the right purpose. These simple pieces of data can help you gage ‘the health’ of your service department.

1. Resolution times

To the customer, resolution time is key. How long do they need to wait on average for their ticket to be resolved? And does it differ for various incident priority levels?

If you experience very long resolution times on tickets, or large variation in response times to resolve the same issue, this will of course affect your reputation as a Service Desk and the services you provide. This simple report can uncover a lot of areas for improvement. Remember, though, that the customer cares about the overall resolution time, and not how long the ticket was held at different teams.

And before you dive head first into fixing the issue, make sure you know what the source of the problem is. Look to your other metrics if you can, or have a chat with the team. There could be a correlation with staff levels, insufficient training for certain issues or confusion as to who picks up what ticket.

2. The tickets’ journey(s)

You should also measure the number of tickets that are solved straight away, the first-time fix, versus the ones that need to be passed on. This can help you gauge either how difficult the incidents that are logged are, or the level of knowledge of your first line staff.

See if there are any tickets that keep being passed through that could be solved by the first line with a little bit of training. Maybe some tickets have really really quick response time and seem very repetitive? Consider turning these into knowledge articles in your Self Service Portal.

3. Tickets processed/Staff available

This is important to measure your efficiency. Measure the amount of tickets processed over your number of available service agents. The number here could give you insight into two different areas of improvement– either that your team is overworked, or that you may need to hire more staff or find a way to make your processes more efficient. Maybe some information can be shifted left?

4. The Services with the most Incidents

If you want to keep track of which of your services may need more attention or find problem areas, this is where to look. What causes the most Service Desk support calls? If you find that something breaks a lot for example, then a way to free up more time for your team is to fix that issue once and for all. Or if there is something that people keep asking you about, find a way to inform them about it in a different way.

5. Your ticketing backlog

Trend data will help you spot things that may need changing or updating, or seasonally reoccurring events that you can plan for better if you are aware they are coming up.

This metric can also be used retrospectively, to show your team or someone higher up that a fix you implemented to fix a problem you spotted previously indeed had an impact. And check your backlog data. If your number of tickets that are unresolved keeps growing, it may be worth looking into.

For more on optimising your services, try our e-book on Best Practice Service Management